Printed in sepia ink with decorative borders and line drawings, this handsome omnibus of Thomas Bulfinch's classic retellings of famous myths and folk legends for general readers features interpretive essays by Princeton classics professor Richard Martin. For The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855), Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. The Age of Chivalry (1858) contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History. Bulfinch completes the series with Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages (1862). These tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch reasoned, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.... Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."